Canelo / Arts Council England

Canelo / Arts Council England | 
27

Literature in the 21st Century: Understanding Models of Support for Literary Fiction
17
Ibid p41
reshape notions of literary value and taste’
17
. Squires here suggests that 
our whole idea of what, today, is literary fiction is a function of publisher 
marketing in the first place. 
Outlets for publicity and reviews show a similarly mixed picture. Most 
publishers maintain in-house publicity departments and this remains an 
industry strength. Yet space devoted to reviews in the traditional media 
is under relentless pressure. The 
Guardian
is the only broadsheet to 
maintain a dedicated literary review. In the US, major papers such as 
the 
LA Times
famously closed their book sections. Publications such 
as the 
Times Literary Supplement
and the 
London Review of Books
continue to be produced, but they can hardly be said to talk to a mass 
audience. Television and film’s engagement with literary fiction is 
limited, but powerful when it does occur. A film adaptation is sure to 
boost sales immensely and as the Hollywood dream factory runs out 
of ideas, books are turned to more and more as source material. This 
can only be a good thing for writers. Ironically, traditional publicity is still 
probably easier for literary fiction than more commercial genres: reviews 
pages are more likely to cover it and its writers are more likely to be 
interviewed on TV. 
Prizes are the other major source of sales for literary writing. They now 
form what the scholar James F. English calls an ‘economy of prestige’, 
whereby the cultural authority and imprimatur of a literary prize is a 
major source of cash revenue. An analysis of sales data around the 
leading British literary prize, the Man Booker, confirms this. 
In the years between 2002 and 2008 there were a series of ‘big’ 
winners of the Man Booker: 
Life of Pi, Vernon God Little, The Line 
of Beauty
and 
The White Tiger
. These books saw an average post-
Prize sales lift of 6,456 copies in the week after winning. However, 
more recently, and despite some of the books being seen as less 
commercial than these, there has been an average Prize-week sales lift 
of 12,031 copies, nearly double what it was in the mid-noughties. Two 
recent winners, Richard Flanagan and Marlon James, both of whom 
write relatively ‘difficult’ books, each saw around 10,000 additional 
sales in the week after winning. To put that in perspective, when Ian 
McEwan’s 
Amsterdam
won in 1998 its weekly sale was 3,000; in 2001 
Peter Carey’s 
The True History of the Kelly Gang
was 4,000. Despite 
everything, and even adjusting for the positive anomaly that was the 
vast sales of Hilary Mantel’s 
Wolf Hall
and 
Bring Up The Bodies
, the 
Man Booker is growing steadily more influential and more powerful as a 
sales engine. 

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